'Catastrophic': Orgs warn Trump's new massive health cut plan poses 'existential' threat

President Donald Trump is planning for the Department of Health and Human Services to receive a cut of one-third of its overall discretionary budget, or roughly $40 billion, with potentially disastrous ramifications for health in the country, experts told The Washington Post.

"The HHS budget draft, known as a 'passback,' offers the first full look at the health and social service priorities of President Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget as it prepares to send his 2026 fiscal year budget request to Congress," said the report. "It shows how the Trump administration plans to reshape the federal health agencies that oversee food and drug safety, manage the nation’s response to infectious-disease threats and drive biomedical research."

Even some of the prevention-based care that Trump's HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said should be part of his "Make America Healthy Again" initiative is slated for cuts.

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Congress does not have to comply with the budget request and often ignores presidential proposals; however, House Republicans could well decide to take up a similar proposal, the report noted.

The proposed shrinking of the budget from $121 billion to $80 billion comes as "the administration already has downsized HHS by about one-fourth of its workforce, with about 20,000 imminent departures since Trump took office. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention staff who worked on programs to prevent drowning and gun violence, improve worker safety and test for sexually transmitted illnesses and hepatitis were among those laid off."

Meanwhile, said the report, "National Institutes of Health staffers who specialize in managing scientific funding have been ordered to terminate contracts and cancel hundreds of grants that fund research on topics such as vaccine hesitancy, transgender health and covid."

Topping it all off, the Trump administration also recently slashed staffing at the key HHS agency responsible for overseeing child care, raising alarm that an already strained system around the country could become less safe for children — and his plan calls for more funding cuts at Head Start, the program that funds child care for lower-income people and communities.

“It would be catastrophic. More than a million parents wouldn’t be able to go to work from all those children, or they would have to scramble to find some other type of option,” National Head Start Association deputy director Tommy Sheridan told the Post. “In a lot of communities, Head Start is the only early childhood provider in the community — especially rural America.”